


What You Don't Know You Have

by Dira Sudis (dsudis)



Series: Gameplay Vignettes [2]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Theft, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 05:45:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19435114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dsudis/pseuds/Dira%20Sudis
Summary: Geralt lets himself into people's houses. To steal things, of course. Why else?





	What You Don't Know You Have

**Author's Note:**

> Another story inspired by me playing the game and watching Geralt do video game character things and then wanting a story about how that would work for an actual person.

Except within the walls of a single keep--now more ruin than castle, and more a tomb than a home--a witcher was always in a foreign country. No matter what soil he was born on, he was an alien and a stranger everywhere, and no matter how he dressed or what accent he put on, everyone he met knew it as soon as they got a look at his eyes. Geralt could count his fellow countrymen on the fingers of one hand. His odds of meeting one of them on the Path were about the same as two arrows from opposing archers happening to meet in midair between them. 

Everyone who met him knew he was something strange, something entirely different from themselves, whether they already knew exactly what he was or not. On the rare occasion when he wasn't met with disgust or hostility, when he was seen as something other than an errand boy for particularly distasteful tasks, the people who were willing to speak to him were the ones who were interested in his strangeness. They wanted to hear tales of his life and work, which was farther beyond their reckoning than what made it into the ballads.

The thing no one ever seemed to realize was that they were just as foreign to him. Geralt wouldn't ask them to tell him stories about their strange and fascinating experiences, mainly because the thing that was strange and fascinating about them was that they didn't make for interesting stories. Even if they did, hardly anyone knew how to tell them coherently, and anyway Geralt couldn't bring himself to ask. He disliked it enough when they asked him, and he _did_ have a whole stock of stories, honed through reporting to clients and other witchers and nosy people like themselves. 

He wouldn't inflict his curiosity on strangers. They wouldn't receive it kindly, and they already had enough reasons not to like him. 

He could watch, though. Every now and then he could catch a glimpse of the bizarre world they lived in where they might never travel more than ten miles from the place they were born, might never shed another person's blood or face a person or creature intent on doing them harm. 

Witchers didn't usually see them in those circumstances; witchers mostly met ordinary people during the worst times of their lives. It was the nature of the job. They carried violence and death with them wherever they went. 

But even in the midst of a war or a monster incursion those people understood that it wasn't the natural condition of things, the way Geralt understood that winters at Kaer Morhen, idle and companionable and safe, would always end. He would always return to the Path; everyone else expected to return, eventually, to their peaceful homes. 

Their homes, now, that was where Geralt could find the stories he couldn't ask anyone to tell in words. 

Every witcher was light-fingered as a matter of survival, and the art of picking locks and lifting latches was taught to them as routinely as every other skill they needed on the Path. They were taught not to be ashamed to take what they needed, or might need, from anywhere they could find it; their presence was a protection against much worse than a little thieving, even to those who had no idea of the dangers. One way or another, a witcher always got paid.

They were taught, also, how to take _safely_ , without getting themselves and all witchers branded as common thieves. Never take the last of anything; never take from a house that holds less than you've got in your pack, or has more mouths to feed than visible things to feed them. Never take something unique. Never take anything from under a pillow or between the pages of a prayer book. Never damage things you don't take with you, if you can help it.

In the small ways as in matters of destiny, it was better to take what people didn't even know they had. One spoon from a drawerful, one coil of wire or length of cloth from a crate of identical ones, a handful of coins left carelessly on a table, a cheaply printed book from a crowded shelf.

Sometimes what Geralt wanted from them was less easily pocketed. On a summer morning, when the early northern dawn came before even servants would be stirring, he might slip into a farmhouse or a particularly prosperous-looking cottage. Somewhere he could be reasonably sure no one would be sleeping within a few steps of the door he let himself in through.

Some of those rich places had a little room that was nothing but an entryway, a space only there to be walked through, and to display whatever the householder wanted visitors to see first. And even when the door opened onto a living and working space, a miniature version of Kaer Morhen's great hall, there was a tidy stillness to it. 

Everything was in order, in a way no place at Kaer Morhen had been even when it was a living keep full of witchers and boys. Everything was neat, cared for in a way that spoke of how much time and attention people had to give to such inconsequential things as the shine on a candlestick or the waxed finish of a bench. In a home that might belong to only a handful of people, there were all these belongings--not accumulated of necessity to house an entire school and support the work of dozens of witchers, but collected as a matter of course by people who never expected to leave a place with only what they could carry on their backs. 

Geralt might walk a soft-footed circuit of the room, just looking at all the _things_ , breathing in the particular home-smell of the place, compounded of cooking and bodies and, usually, some sort of soap or perfume or at least herbs strewn with the rushes underfoot. He might just sit for a little while by the door, watching the sun come through the windows, listening to the breathing of a sleeping family, slumbering unconcerned, as if no danger could possibly breach the walls of their little home. 

That peace was something they would only ever notice in its absence; while they had it they were never truly aware of it. That was nothing Geralt could take away with him, so he would steal something simple, just to remember a place, or to give himself an excuse for having gone in at all. A spool of thread, an empty jar, something he could easily tuck into a pocket as he went. It was just enough to let him pretend that he hadn't gone in seeking something he could never have, even when he stood in the middle of it.

He wouldn't want it if he could have it, not really; it would be an even more unwieldy surprise than the sort he'd asked for a few fateful times before. It would be even more alien to him than a little girl had been, once, and he doubted destiny would guide him through it to a happy conclusion. 

Still, it was good sometimes, to remind himself of what it looked like, this other world he protected by staying outside it. 

He always locked the doors again behind him when he slipped back out, so nothing else would find its way inside after he was gone and shatter the peace he'd tasted. He'd been taught not to destroy what he couldn't take with him, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is also on Tumblr, feel free to [like or reblog it there](https://dsudis.tumblr.com/post/185979438524/what-you-dont-know-you-have)!


End file.
